textfiles/magazines/CHAOSCORNER/ccv02n07.txt

Chaos Corner V02 N07  02Aug92

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New Format for Chaos Corner

At long last, with nearly 300 published items, it has become necessary 
for Dr. Chaos to get all of this organized.  Even though yesterday was a 
beautiful, cool, sunny day, Dr. Chaos spent his time going through all 
the back issues putting in separator lines and item headers.  Using the 
WAIS software, he only has to enter a few keywords and up pops the 
specific item he wants to see.  Of course, this work will benefit more 
than just Dr. Chaos.  Look for announcements soon on how you can use 
WAIS software on your PC, Macintosh, or Unix system to remotely search 
the Chaos Corner archives.

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WAIS on RS/6000 AIX 3.1 information needed

Of course, one reason that the conversion of Chaos Corner to a set of 
WAIS-index items took all day was that Dr. Chaos decided that he should 
be running the latest version of the WAIS code (wais-8-b5).  After much 
futile effort, he was unsuccessful at getting it to compile on an 
RS/6000 under AIX 3.1 (whereas the compiler does not complain about 
apparently identical code in the previous version of wais).  If anyone 
has been successful at getting that version to compile, Dr. Chaos could 
use some help.

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Gopher (Rice version) on CMS information needed

Yesterday was really one of frustration ... while Dr. Chaos was battling 
with WAIS, I was trying to get the latest version of Rice Gopher working 
in CMS.  The latest version uses an operand LINEND (or something like 
that) on the DEBLOCK command that our version of CMS Pipes doesn't seem 
to like.  Is it just that we are running an old version of PIPES or is 
there something else I am missing?  (The new version of Gopher is 
necessary to use the Gopher-WAIS gateways that are available.)

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Major copyright faux pas -- Many apologies extended

Mark Dionne at Interleaf (a company known for its publishing software) 
sent a red-faced Dr. Chaos the following note:

   The article "Scientific Truth in Product Warning Labels" by Susan 
   Hewitt and Edward Subitzky, which appeared in Chaos Corner recently, 
   is copyrighted material from the Journal of Irreproducible Results, 
   of which I am Associate Editor. Please notify your readers, and 
   anyone else who may copy this article, that it is copyrighted. It 
   would also be helpful if you would tell your readers that 
   subscriptions to the Journal can be obtained by contacting:

      Blackwell Scientific Publishing, Inc.
      Three Cambridge Center
      Cambridge, MA 02142
      (617) 225-0401

Mark was also nice enough to subscribe to Chaos Corner (welcome); I hope 
for more reasons than to watch out for copyright violations.

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Catching Alligators

Here's one more try at humor -- this from Bob Blackmun, and I certainly 
would think that anyone would be embarrassed to have the copyright on 
this one:

To catch an alligator, you take a telescope, a box of matches, a pair of 
tweezers and dull book to a house in the Everglades.  You go inside the 
house and make sure that all the windows and doors are locked securely, 
except one small window that you open. Then you go outside and walk 
around until an alligator spots you. When he does, you let him chase you 
back to the house, and you go inside and lock the door.  Then, sit down 
in the most comfortable chair in the house and begin to read the book.  
Since it is a dull book, you will fall asleep very quickly.  Meanwhile, 
the alligator runs around and around the house, looking for a way to get 
inside. Finally, he sees the small window and climbs in.  Imagine his 
surprise to find you asleep!  Wondering why, he picks up your book and 
begins to read.   Since it is a *dull* book, the alligator also falls 
asleep very quickly. Since you fell asleep first, you wake up first, 
pick up the telescope and look at the alligator through the wrong end, 
pick him up with the tweezers and put him in the match box!

And that's how you catch an alligator!

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A Unix clone for the 386 - Linux

Nicolai Langfeldt (janl@ifi.uio.no) from Norway points out the great 
amount of activity around a rapidly developing Unix clone for the Intel 
386 architecture.  He writes:

Heard about linux? A very nice unix clone for i386 machines, and if 
you've got a video card mit's stock X11R5 server for 386 supports, you 
get X11 as well! A must for all computer nuts! In principle you can run 
it on two diskettes, but it's better to run it on a HD (let's say 
minimum 10Mb partition). 4Mb mem should be enough to do some things, if 
you add 4Mb of swap (or real RAM) you can do much more, and so on.

Linux enthusiasts meet in the newsgroup comp.os.linux, and on irc 
channel named #linux. For the even more enthusiastic there is a mailing 
list (linux-activists).

Linux is evolving rapidly, Linus (the author..., A 3'rd yr CS student at 
Univ. in Helsinki, Finland) releases weekly patches, and a lot of people 
are contributing to it, with kernel fixes, X11 was ported by 3rd party, 
scsi disk drivers, and _lots_ more! It's POSIX compliant and pretty 
stable. Most of the programs are ports of GNU software of-course...

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OS/2 and FAX software

As Dr. Chaos will loudly agree, DOS or Windows software for using fax 
boards or modems do not seem to get along with OS/2.  The discussions on 
the net seem to be in favor of two products that work well with OS/2: 
BitFax and PMFax.  The two programs are reported to be similar except 
that PMFax supports the Intel SatisFAXtation (and some other proprietary 
boards).  Perhaps by the next issue, Dave Gomberg at UC San Francisco 
will be able to report on his experiences?

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New versions of Frequently Asked Questions

It's the start of a new month, so the new FAQ postings are starting to 
roll out.  Recent arrivals include new postings for the nn newsreader 
and the mh mail system (both in Unix) and a new version of the FAQ for 
OS/2.  Let Dr. Chaos know at chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu if 
you need copies of any of these.

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Having trouble with Windows 3.1? You need WDL!

Microsoft issues updates to drivers associated with Windows 3.1 by 
making them available on their BBS and on CompuServe.  (It is known as 
the Windows Drivers Library.)  Many of these updates also make their way 
to the Internet Windows archive, ftp.cica.indiana.edu.  The drivers for 
a very LARGE number of printers have been updated, along with video 
drivers, the CD-ROM driver, the Solitaire game, the MSDOS executive, and 
many more.  Let Dr. Chaos know at chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu 
if you would like a copy of the list of updated software (the file is 
over 300 lines long).

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Windows version of LOGO

The wonderfully popular Apple ][ software called Logo is now available 
for Windows -- and it is free!  Version 1.1 of the software has just 
been released to UseNet so expect it soon on a Windows archive near you.  
If you just can't wait, I did put a copy under the name mswlogo1.zip on 
puffin.cit.cornell.edu. (Don't forget to use 'binary' before you 
transfer it to your machine.)

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Fixes available to X11R5 (would you believe #16 is the latest?)

A large number of fixes have been made available to the MIT X Window 
System Version 11 Release 5 software.  As usual, all fixes are available 
at export.lcs.mit.edu, or you can get them locally (to Cornell) on 
pelican.cit.cornell.edu in the /pub/X11R5 directory.

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What does Dr. Chaos know about WAIS?

I know, ever since you started this issue, you have been wondering what 
I was talking about with searching, indexing, and that stuff.  Dr. Chaos 
has mentioned (and been corrected) about WAIS before, but he is willing 
to try again.  Actually, the real motivation is that last October, Rick 
Cochran sent Dr. Chaos a mail file asking the question above, and Dr. 
Chaos COULDN'T STAND to admit that he didn't know much at all about one 
of the exciting new developments in accessing information across the 
Internet.  Having had much more exposure in the past several weeks, he 
is willing to try again (and he is confident that the gentle readers 
will correct him if he goes astray).

Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) are now available across the 
Internet on a broad range of topics (currently over 250 servers freely 
advertise their archives).  Keywords for the information topics 
available at each server is maintained on a Connection Machine at The 
Thinking Machines Corporation (think.com).  This directory-of-servers is 
the "root level" of a query which can then allow you to search all the 
servers at one time that appear to have information you need.  Queries 
with a large number of keywords may return a correspondingly large 
number of items, but the items are scored by "relevance" and those with 
high scores are presented first.  The amazing capability of WAIS is the 
ability to refine a search by selecting articles YOU find to be 
relevant, and telling the search engine to "go find me more articles 
like these".  That very powerful capability along with being able to 
store queries and re-execute them later goes a long way in turning the 
veritable flood of network data into a manageable stream of network 
information.

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How can I get more information about WAIS?

The fastest way to get more information is to use telnet to access 
quake.think.com and login as user 'wais'.  That will allow you to use 
WAIS to search for information about WAIS. (It does help to be at some 
terminal that can emulate a vt100, in fact, Dr. Chaos can guarantee that 
it doesn't work usefully to attempt telnet from a 3270 session.)

Software to access WAIS servers currently exists for the Macintosh, for 
the PC using the Clarkson Packet Drivers, for the PC using Windows and 
FTP Software's TCP/IP protocol stack, for Unix (there is a 'diff' file 
to get it working on an RS/6000 and AIX), and there is a very nice X 
Windows implementation.  If you have the latest version of Gopher 
available to you, there are a number of Gopher/WAIS gateways that allow 
searches (but not necessarily all the features are available).

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Are there useful things for WAIS besides searches?

Dr. Chaos normally stores items of interest using RiceMail ... which 
puts the items in files called "notebooks" with each items separated by 
a row of + signs.  It took Dr. Chaos (and he doesn't know very much 
about C at all) about 15 minutes to define a new file structure type for 
RiceMail that gave Dr. Chaos the ability to index all his mail files for 
almost instant retrieval!  No more need to keep multiple copies of files 
(should the item about fax software under OS/2 be fined under OS/2 or 
should it be under FAX?)  In fact, it's not necessary to file it 
ANYWHERE! ... just drop it into any old notebook and WAIS will allow you 
to pull it out again.

Of course. many file formats are already handled, for instance the 
format of this Chaos Corner required no changes.  All in all, it's very 
easy to either fit the data to the software or fit the software to the 
data ... as you choose.

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That's all for now ... I'm back to using Word for Windows and I'm over 
10,000 characters again (but this time I will use a spell checker).  Act 
now and don't delay, it's easy to subscribe -- just send your request 
off to chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu.

Dr. Chaos (I have a Master's Degree)